James' World 2

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As the summer winds to a close, and we reluctantly trade beach days and late sunsets for cooler weather and school or work, we also have to confront the reality that COVID will remain a part of our lives. The U.S. has already seen a summer bump in cases in recent weeks, with hospitalizations and wastewater levels of the virus creeping back up. So many people may be wondering when they can get another COVID vaccine.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the updated fall COVID booster will likely be available around mid-September—once the agency authorizes it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will then issue recommendations on which groups of people can or should get vaccinated.

An FDA advisory committee met in June to determine which strains of the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 should be included in the fall booster. It settled on XBB.1.5, which has been the dominant variant in the U.S. for much of this year. Recently a new variant called BA.

2.86 was detected, and it has more than 35 new mutations, compared with XBB.1.5. Cases of BA.2.86—which, like XBB.1.5, is an offshoot of the well-known Omicron variant—have been found in the U.S., Denmark, Israel, and other countries. The new variant currently makes up only a tiny fraction of cases, although SARS-CoV-2 is being sequenced and tracked far less closely today. Whether BA.2.86 is better at evading the immune system or causes more severe disease remains to be seen, but FDA scientists say the fall COVID booster and prior immunity should still help protect against serious illness.

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Credit: Eric Lee for the Washington Post via Getty Images

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America’s birds are in trouble. Since 1970, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished from the skies over North America.

Most of those losses have been in migratory species, which may breed in the United States or Canada in the summer before heading elsewhere for the winter. Many spend more time living on Caribbean beaches or in Costa Rican forests than they do in American backyards. “They’re really visitors to North America,” said Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, co-director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Protecting these birds will require working across international borders and safeguarding all of their habitats, many of which are under threat. If migrating birds lose their winter refuges, the consequences will ripple across the hemisphere.

“If we lose Central America’s forests, we can lose North America’s birds,” said Jeremy Radachowsky, the director for Mesoamerica and the western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

To illuminate these connections, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology developed “shared stewardship” maps in collaboration with Partners in Flight, an international bird conservation network. Each map displays the key wintering grounds for the migratory species that have a significant summer presence in a particular U.S. state or region. The maps are based on data from eBird, a database of observations from bird watchers around the world.

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Simone Noronha

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On an overcast spring morning in 2012, Federica Bertocchini was tending to her honeybees close to where she lived in Santander, on Spain’s picturesque northern coast. One of the honeycombs “was plagued with worms,” says the amateur apiarist, referring to the pesky larvae of wax moths that have a voracious — and destructive — appetite.

Bertocchini picked out the worms, placed them in a plastic bag, and carried on with her beekeeping chores. When she retrieved the bag a few hours later, she noticed something strange: It was full of tiny holes.

The scientist’s interest was piqued. Had the hungry worms simply chewed up the plastic, or had they changed its chemical makeup too? Quick tests in her lab confirmed, surprisingly, the latter: Something in the worms’ saliva had degraded the plastic. “From that point, the research started,” says Bertocchini, a developmental biologist formerly with the Spanish National Research Council.

She is now the co-founder of Plasticentropy — one of the numerous startups and research groups that have sprouted in recent years seeking bio-inspired means to recycle plastic. This biological recycling, as it’s called, could offer more effective and environmentally friendly alternatives to some of today’s problem-riddled recycling methods.

The effort has scientists scouring landfills, auto-wrecking yards, and other sites teeming with plastic pollution in search of organisms that might be able to break down plastic into its component pieces. By taking these microbes and enhancing their polymer-munching abilities in the lab, scientists hope to find an efficient way of reclaiming the building blocks of plastics. They would then use these subunits to manufacture new materials, thus creating an “infinite recycling” loop.

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Discoveries that certain plastics can be broken down by enzymes, such as those in the saliva of the waxworm moth (Galleria mellonella) larva shown here, have propelled the biological recycling movement. CREDIT: CESAR HERNANDEZ / CSIC

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There’s a lot of trash on the Moon right now – including nearly 100 bags of human waste – and with countries around the globe traveling to the Moon, there’s going to be a lot more, both on the lunar surface and in Earth’s orbit.

In August 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 probe crashed into the Moon’s surface, while India’s Chandrayann-3 mission successfully landed in the southern polar region, making India the fourth country to land on the Moon.

With more countries landing on the Moon, people back on Earth will have to think about what happens to all the landers, waste and miscellaneous debris left on the lunar surface and in orbit.

I’m a professor of astronomy who has written a book about the future of space travel, articles about our future off-Earth, conflict in space, space congestion, and the ethics of space exploration. Like many other space experts, I’m concerned about the lack of governance around space debris.

Space is getting crowded

People think of space as vast and empty, but the near-Earth environment is starting to get crowded. As many as 100 lunar missions are planned over the next decade by governments and private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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The Union of Concerned Scientists lists 1,459 operating satellites, though another 11,600 float around Earth as space junk. Image by ERIS

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Signs in the U.S. continue to point to a rise in Covid activity as fall approaches.

Hospitalizations are rising. Deaths have ticked up. Wastewater samples are picking up the virus, as are labs across the country. 

“Every single one of those things is showing us that we have increased rates of Covid transmission in our communities,” said Jodie Guest, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. 

While individual cases have become more difficult to track as states are no longer required to report numbers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at-home test use has increased, experts have turned to other tools to track the virus. 

Hospitalizations, for example, are “a very good indicator of severity of Covid disease,” Guest said. 

The number of hospitalized Covid patients has continued to rise after hitting an all-time low in late June. The week ending Aug. 26, the most recent date for which data is available, there were just over 17,400 people hospitalized with Covid, up nearly 16% from the previous week, according to the CDC.

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David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”

Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.

While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.

“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.

In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.

The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.

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You walk into a room, but can’t remember what you came in for. Or you bump into an old acquaintance at work and forget their name. Most of us have had momentary memory lapses like this, but in middle age, they can start to feel more ominous. Do they make us look unprofessional or past it? Could this even be a sign of impending dementia? The good news for the increasingly forgetful, however, is that not only can memory be improved with practice, but that it looks increasingly as if some cases of Alzheimer’s may be preventable too.

Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak is a past president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, who has lectured on the brain and behavior everywhere from the Pentagon to Nasa, and written more than 20 books on the human brain. His latest, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind, homes in on the great unspoken fear that every time you can’t remember where you put your reading glasses, it’s a sign of impending doom. “In America today,” he writes, “anyone over 50 lives in dread of the big A.” Memory lapses are, he writes, the single most common complaint over-55s raise with their doctors, even though much of what they describe turns out to be nothing to worry about.

Coming out of a shop and not being able to remember where you left the car, for example, is perfectly normal: it’s likely you just weren’t concentrating when you parked, and therefore the car’s location wasn’t properly encoded in your brain. Forgetting what you came into a room for is probably just a sign you’re busy and preoccupied with other things, says Restak.

“Samuel Johnson said that the art of memory is the art of attention,” he says, down the line from his office in Washington, DC (at 80, Restak is still a practicing clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health). “Most of these sins of ‘memory loss’ are sins of not paying attention. If you’re at a party, and you’re not really listening to someone, because you are still thinking about some work-related matter, suddenly later you find you can’t remember their name. The first thing is you put the information in memory – that’s consolidating it – and then you have to be able to retrieve it. But if you’ve never consolidated it in the first place, it doesn’t exist.”

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A father and daughter. Photo by Cavan Images/Getty Images

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Every week between May and October, the Maricopa County Department of Public Health in Arizona releases a heat morbidity report. The most recent report said that 180 people have succumbed to heat-associated illness in the county this year so far. But everyone agrees that number is off.

If previous years are any indication, the true number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is much higher: At the end of last summer, the county revised its initial reports upwards by a factor of five, ultimately reporting a sobering 425 heat-related deaths in total.

This lag plagues not just heat-related mortality reporting, but climate-related death data in general. It’s hard to get a full picture of the true number of mortalities connected to a given disaster in real-time. The full death toll often isn’t revealed until weeks, months, even years after the event occurs. And an unknown fraction of deaths often slide by undetected, never making it onto local and federal mortality spreadsheets at all. For example, a recent retrospective study found the number of people who died from exposure to hurricanes and tropical cyclones in the U.S. in the years between 1988 to 2019 was 13 times higher than the federal government’s official estimates. 

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People seek shelter from the heat at the First Congregational United Church of Christ cooling center on July 14 in Phoenix. Brandon Bell / Getty Images

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The population of our ancestors may have plummeted to as low as 1300 around 900,000 years ago, possibly as a result of our ancestral species splitting from other early humans.

That is the conclusion of an analysis of the variation in the genomes of living people by Haipeng Li at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health and his colleagues. However, while not dismissing the idea outright, independent experts say it isn’t supported by other lines of evidence.

Population bottlenecks occur when an existing population is reduced in size, for instance as a result of a catastrophe, or when a small number of individuals leave one population to found a new one. This results in a sudden loss of genetic diversity.

There have been numerous bottlenecks of varying scales as humans evolved and moved around the world. For instance, there was a major bottleneck when a small number of modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago, which is why there is still much more genetic diversity among people of African descent than in everyone living in the rest of the world combined. Much more recently, there was a series of bottlenecks as Polynesians settled island after island in the Pacific.

Past bottlenecks can be uncovered by looking for the reductions in genetic diversity they cause, but more ancient bottlenecks are harder to detect than recent ones. Li’s team developed a new method for estimating past changes in population size and applied it to the genomes of more than 3,000 people from around the world.

According to the researchers’ findings, the population of our ancestors fell by 98 percent to around 1280 “breeding individuals” around 930,000 years ago, and the population remained very low until around 815,000 years ago.

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